This chapter examines efforts to list Kenya’s ‘minorities’ and ‘marginalised communities,’ categories in the 2010 constitution entitled to affirmative action in government representation, resource distribution and public service employment. These are the first classifications with allocative consequences since colonial times. I examine how these terms are operationalised in legal cases, by government Commissions, and by civil society. I show the impossibility of arriving at a fixed list and illuminate myriad strategies for responding to competing political demands for status. These are quintessential examples of cultivated vagueness. I show how this enables both generosity in conferring special status and its application in divisive ways. I use three cases of code seeking – Nubian, Wayyu and Sakuye peoples – to further illustrate both how vague codes have become and how politically salient they are. I examine both the limits of classification in this space and explore ways to make them work to benefit marginalised people. I conclude with some alternatives to classification for remedying marginalisation.

Chapter 5 examines the representational role of moral rhetoric. Moral rhetoric can be considered parties’ attempts to signal that they represent the moral values of the electorate. If so, how important is moral rhetoric as a form of moral representation? I answer this question by examining people’s attitudes about moral rhetoric in politics. I theorize that many voters want some level of moral discourse in politics, although there is variation in attitudes. I further theorize that demand for a party’s moral rhetoric exists not only among voters who support the party but also among voters who appreciate moral reasoning in politics, even if they do not support the party. Survey data from six countries show that many voters indeed want to see moral discourse in politics. Moreover, voters’ demands for moral rhetoric have partisan and nonpartisan antecedents. A voter’s copartisan status with the party positively predicts greater demand for moral rhetoric, but so does a voter’s reliance on moral reasoning when thinking about politics, holding partisanship constant. In short, we learn that moral rhetoric has representational significance for broad groups of the electorate.

After the armed struggle of the Revolution (1910–20), Mexican cinema, particularly during the época de oro (Golden Age, roughly 1930–52), had a profound impact on Mexican popular culture. One of the most intriguing elements was how the film industry captured Mexican music history, particularly the intimate practice of musical performances conducted within the salon. This essay moves through various points in Mexican history, as told by the film industry, to uncover a practice of representation and interpretation of the roles of women in the salon. Mexican musical history is a rich and vibrant narrative of cosmopolitanism and changing narratives of gender roles that the film industry manipulated and exploited on the big screen. Although functioning as a reinterpretation of historical periods, these films act as significant cultural texts to understanding the industry’s and the culture’s knowledge of women performers in the Mexican salon.

Chapter 3 concerns Hegel’s use of the term “the Concept” (der Begriff) in the Doctrine of the Concept. The chapter argues that the use of this term is closer to its ordinary philosophical meaning than is claimed by standard metaphysical readings of the Logic. In particular, the singular use of “the Concept” is a synecdoche for the structure of conceptual thought as exemplified in philosophy in general. Hegel argues that conceptual thought has a formal structure of universality, particularity, and singularity. However, in contrast to many interpretations, these are not treated as properties that all concepts must have to be concepts. Rather, these formal features are exhibited variously in different concepts, judgments, and syllogisms. Hegel’s discussion of the formal dimension of thought sets up his attempt to show that some structures of thought more perfectly exemplify the form of the Concept than others.

This chapter offers a description of the method. Elaborating on the tradition of adda, the chapter explains its significance within post-colonial thought and life in India. It then explains how adda is shaped as a method in the book by drawing on and joining insights from the works of scholars who are located within the disciplines of law and/or the humanities. The chapter provides a detailed description of how diverse scholarly works of post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought are brought together and then enacted as field research for this book.

The protagonist of Chapter 4 is the Ciceronian concept of the persona civitatis, an idea which comes to be associated with the ‘person of the state’ in Renaissance political philosophy. The first section of this chapter identifies the firmly theatrical role which this idea delineates in Cicero’s political thinking about the character of civil associations and the duties of the executive magistrate in the Roman Republic. It also illuminates how Cicero derives the idea from the same Stoic theory of personae which is subsequently developed by Seneca in a more markedly monarchical vein. The second section of the chapter then recounts the historical career of the persona civitatis, which comes to act as the pivot of a highly influential theory of representation in Renaissance political thought – a theory which proved indispensable to the humanist task of sustaining classical claims about liberty and the res publica in this transformed post-classical environment. In Renaissance Florence, Bruni, Palmieri, Manetti, and Alberti all recur to this theory to talk about how the republic can be embodied and articulated as a person. This is a line of thinking which Machiavelli will refuse to endorse: he never accepts that the state can be represented.

Non-normative sexual and gender identities are not new to Africa, but their representation in literary texts has grown significantly over the past two decades, establishing queer literature as a burgeoning genre. This chapter focuses on what defines “queer” in African literature and examines its key features. It compares literary production from different regions of the continent, highlighting both continuities and diversity in the representation of queerness. Particular attention is given to Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions to consider the similarities and divergences in representations of queerness across these linguistic and cultural contexts. These literary analyses are interwoven with scholarly debates, showing how literature and academic discourse on African queerness inform and influence one another. Drawing on Keguro Macharia’s concept of “frottage,” the chapter examines how interactions between African and queer identities can evoke both generative and conflictual affects. The chapter ultimately interrogates the politics of queer representation in literature, particularly in queerphobic contexts in Africa. In so doing, the chapter explores how literature not only makes queerness visible but also negotiates difference and nonconformity.

When the French Revolution erupted, political actors were confronted with the challenge of institutionalizing the power of the people. The debates that ensued were multifaceted as various conceptualizations of public opinion and popular sovereignty were considered. This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive study of the revolutionary deployment of each of these notions. Rather, the focus will be on Condorcet, Robespierre and key Montagnard theorists to illustrate how their shifting views on public opinion and popular sovereignty culminated in conflicting versions of “representative democracy” in the constitutional debate of 1793. For these theorists, “representative democracy” designated a mixed regime in which the people, in addition to electing representatives (representation), directly exercised popular sovereignty (democracy) between elections by frequently voting on political issues in citizens’ assemblies spread throughout the national territory.

Chapter 9 continues to explicate Machiavelli’s theory of the state in the Discorsi, showing how he avails himself of many of the conceptual materials whose place in his earlier thinking has now been observed. It illustrates how Machiavelli continues to conceptualize the state as a body and to understand the work of state formation as an aesthetic process which involves carefully shaping its human material, although he now tracks that process across the course of centuries in a complex account of the phenomenon of corruption within the career of the Roman state. The chapter also underlines how Machiavelli continues to insist that benefits are a powerful way of generating obligations to the state, although he is now noticeably more concerned about the effects of ingratitude upon beneficiaries who are prone to forget or renege upon their debts. And, as the chapter further emphasizes, he continues to maintain that those who hold office within the state should not be mistaken for representative figures in any capacity whatsoever. This point raises a fundamental problem in how to construe his overall theory: is the state a person as well as a body? The chapter culminates in an attempt to resolve this complex question.

Chapter 7 systematically re-examines Machiavelli’s beliefs about lo stato as they emerge in his early political writings and culminate in the first full statement of his theory in Il Principe. The architecture of that theory is clarified: it is an account of both free and unfree states, and it is shown to be articulated according to a theory of rhetorical definition which was instantly recognizable to his humanist contemporaries. The place of Machiavelli’s thinking about liberty and its absence in the princely state is then investigated, as is his account of state formation, which is demonstrably conducted in equally rhetorical terms, recurring not only to the concepts of form and material to describe how political bodies are artfully assembled and shaped, but also to rhetorical ideas about invention and disposition in Machiavelli’s view of the creative work involved in founding new states. The chapter identifies the evolving role of a theory of political obligation within Machiavelli’s account of the state, before culminating in an analysis of his understanding of Fortuna’s role in state matters and his rejection of the Senecan wisdom which elsewhere informed Renaissance thinking about the remedies for good and bad luck in human affairs.

The arguments of this book are intended to tackle the social injustices faced by people living with dementia, yet reflecting on the author’s social position reveals a tension. As the author is not a member of the social group this book concerns, they are engaging in an act of speaking for others: a practice that has received significant criticism, given the risks of contributing to oppression and stigma through misrepresentation. With this concern in mind, this chapter engages in a reflective exercise about the content of the book, highlighting ways in which the author’s social position may have negatively influenced its content and setting out the steps the author has taken to try to address this.